It’s not business. It’s personal.
The next constitutional crisis has already begun.
1. Buyouts
We are in the early stages of a constitutional crisis.
Last night the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel and Management sent a “buyout” offer to 2 million government employees. The email appears to have been ghostwritten by either Elon Musk or his young lackeys, who now occupy places of power in the federal government.
This “buyout” offer is not legal. It instructs employees to respond with “resign” in the subject line—as if that were a legally binding document.
The compensation in the offer is not legal, either. The OPM email offers eight months of pay; the law allows only up to $25,000 for voluntary separation agreements.
There is no funding for this buyout regime. Just do some rough math with me: The government has offered 2 million workers eight months of pay. The average federal employee makes roughly $100k. If everyone took the offer that’s a $132 billion.1 Where has that money been appropriated from? Show me the line item in the budget which made this funding law and show me which members of Congress voted for it.
The OPM email came a few hours after Trump’s Office of Management and Budget directed the government to cease disbursement of all legally mandated federal funding. Which is not something the executive branch can do, according to the law.
And these two attacks on the legislature came days after Trump issued a baldly unconstitutional executive order directing the federal government to cease issuing citizenship documents to some persons born in the United States.
This is a crisis. The executive is attempting to subjugate the two other branches of government.
The president knows that Congress wants to be subjugated. He hopes the judiciary will consent to subjugation, rather than risking a showdown it might lose.
After all, how many divisions does John Roberts have?